Congressional candidate and former Marine Ilario Pantano first became famous — and notorious — after he killed two unarmed men in Iraq. (The Marine Corps accused him of murder, and later dropped the charges.) More recently, on the campaign trail, he’s known for his aggressive talk about the threat of radical Islam; it’s helped give Pantano a puncher’schance of becoming the first Republican to represent southeastern North Carolina since 1871.

But today, Pantano’s got an agenda that has nothing to do with America’s wars in Central Asia and the Middle East. He wants to talk China’s moon program, its satellite-blinding lasers, and its potential to use Cuba as a launching point for an attack equal to “1,000 Pearl Harbors.”

This isn’t the first time Pantano and I have shot the shit about war and politics. We’ve known each other for 25 years, ever since I was a ska band dork at Horace Mann high school in the Bronx, and he was one of a trio of outsiders running around campus in camouflage.

So Pantano feels comfortable emailing me a heterodox December 2009 policy paper (.pdf) that he wrote as a student at the Institute of World Politics. It lays out a pretty radical scenario: a second Cuban missile crisis, with China replacing the Soviet Union as the enemy, and killer drones in place of nukes. He even gives it an acronym: CMC2.

It’s one of a bunch of topics we covered during a 45-minute phone call — part of Danger Room’s week-long series on the new Congress. Other subjects included Afghanistan’s alleged mineral wealth, the rules governing airstrikes. Then, eventually, we touched on his views about Islam, and about that incident in Iraq.

Ilario Pantano: The threat of a second potential Cuban missile crisis. Basically, with the Chinese as the [instigators] this time, converting Cuba into basically the world’s largest floating missile delivery platform. It’s certainly a dark case scenario or a worst-case scenario, but it’s the kind of scenario that national security thinkers need to be thinking about… Because the technologies that we’re talking about are all feasible and possible… And the political will has been demonstrated. This is a society that has cleansed itself to the tune of 60 million people. So are we really sure that we know what they are and aren’t willing to do?

So I would offer that the threat is real. It’s a worst-case scenario. But like so many worst scenarios, not only is it not impossible, it’s something that we need to consider guarding against.

DR: So does that make China a bigger threat than anything we’re facing in Afghanistan or Pakistan or Iraq?

IP: The war on terror (by the way: misnomer; the war against radical Islam) [is] absolutely dangerous, absolutely lethal. The possibility for dirty bombs, nuclear attacks, all of those things have real consequences. But I would offer to you that the only existential threat to the United States today is in the form of China.

DR: Okay, so if China is an existential threat, doesn’t that mean we should redeploy resources away from less-than-existential threats to meet it?

IP: Right now we’re using the kinetic tools where we need to be applying them. I’m not suggesting that we need to be on the offense with China. I’m not suggesting that we need to be engaged in a hot war right now. What I am saying is that we need to be mindful that there is a threat here that goes way beyond them penetrating Google accounts. It goes way beyond the cybersecurity threat. It goes way beyond them lasing satellites. It goes way beyond what we know to be nuclear and military espionage. It goes way beyond the corporate endeavors and the corporate espionage to ultimately replicate, duplicate and replace American industry… It goes beyond all of that to the UCAV [unmanned combat aerial vehicle] world, to the world of the anti-ship ballistic missile and ultimately to lunar exploration, which potentially we’ve conceded, and deep ocean exploration.

Right now, the Chinese have a lead in very deep-sea submersible technologies …We’ve seen the Chinese planting a flag at the bottom of the ocean. The same naval pundits that say, “Well, they don’t have platform parity with us” [in other words, Chinese ships aren’t as good as American ones] also have to acknowledge the fact that we don’t have platform parity with them.

We are very much in a race. We cannot ever allow China to lead us in any form of exploration or any form of exploitation of natural resource simply because we cannot be 100 percent confident that our best interests are being looked after.

DR: A second Moon race with China won’t be cheap. Where do you get the money to pay for something like that? Domestic spending? Withdrawals from the current wars? Other parts of the defense budget?

IP: I think fundamentally the answer is all of the above. We know we need to be more fiscally responsible. What we’ve done with regards to spending and the debt we know is not sustainable. At the same time as you rightly pointed out, am I suggesting that we need to be in an exploration race with China? And the answer is: Yes, I do think that we need to be.

How do we fund that? We’ve identified a trillion dollars in mineral resources in Afghanistan after we’ve spent thousands of Americans lives and hundreds of billions of dollars to secure that. Why would we ever allow that to be exploited by someone else? We need a public-private partnership with the Afghan people to make sure, to the extent there are fruits to be garnered from our military efforts, we need to make sure that we’re in a position to receive them. So there are certainly some ways that we could be funding these activities.

At the same time, there is room inside of the budget. For example, I’ve been an advocate of shuttering Joint Forces Command. Some Republican congressmen have attacked [that], because ultimately they’re trying to protect jobs in their district. I’m trying to do what I think is best for America and not what is best for a piece of pork.

DR: But if JFCOM is closed, where will the military get its PowerPoint presentations from?

IP: The good news (or the bad news) is that now we’re demanding that our platoon commanders do them in the field in order to get airstrikes. And so unfortunately the culture of technology and distributed accountability has now triggered this crazy [situation]. When company commanders, platoon commanders, forward air controllers in Afghanistan are sending PowerPoints up to the general level officers to get airstrikes approved, clearly we have a problem. We’ve become too reliant on technology.

Folks, one day we’re going to be in a fight with an enemy using [an] EMP [gadget-frying electro-magnetic pulse] and we better remember how to use a compass. We better remember how to use smoke. We better remember how to engage the enemy the old-fashioned way because one day we may lose our strong technical advantage. We certainly found that out as we fought primitives, whether it was in Iraq or Afghanistan.

DR: General McChrystal made it tough to get those airstrikes approved. Was that a mistake?

IP: As somebody who has been in two wars for this country, I have a very acute sense of what the mission. And I’m completely mindful of the fact that war is terrible, that very hard leadership choices have to be made… And my point in challenging – and should I ever, and by the way I haven’t as yet gone on record as challenging the ROE. That was you that made that assumption. I haven’t said that. But what I would say is I want to make sure our commanders are not feeling undue political pressure here domestically. What I don’t want to see is our troops sacrificed on an altar of political correctness in an effort that ultimately prolongs the fighting.

One of the unsung tools of the surge was the fact that we conducted a significantly higher proportion of kinetic operations in 2007 than we had in 2006. We did five times more kinetic air strike missions and there was an over 25 percent increase in kinetic ground combat engagement. My point being, the surge was about killing bad guys as much as it was about the other tools.

I’m mindful that we have reputational things to overcome. I’m mindful that there are sensitivities about protecting the population. But I also am mindful, very personally and very intimately, that our enemies and the bystanders are all waiting to see who will be more effective and who will win. To the extent that we allow the enemy to achieve victories on the battlefield because we were reluctant to engage when we had the opportunity, we lose.

DR: So you said you had a good sense of the mission there. Mind filling me in? Because it’s not clear to me.

IP: The answer to the endgame, the mission in Afghanistan, the clarity of it – I am not clear where we are in regards to achieving objectives. To the extent that our policymakers thus far believe that our engagement in Afghanistan and the ultimate support of a pro-Western government that’s able to govern itself and the ultimate destruction or dysfunction of the Taliban and certainly denying sanctuary to terrorist forces that would attack us – I believe that that is broadly part of the mission in Afghanistan.

My concern about Afghanistan is that I’m not clear what the benchmarks for success are. I’m not clear how we measure success. And I am concerned for the potential of mission creep. What I want to do is I want to withhold making Afghanistan a political issue with 23 days remaining in an election… I’ve actually been to Afghanistan to study it and I am concerned about what the future outcomes are — based on what I know of the conflict, what I know our previous failings in managing the conflict. And I am going to wait until I have the opportunity myself to sit on the Armed Services Committee, to listen to some of the intelligence, and to go and see for myself before I tell you I’m sufficiently satisfied on the clarity of the mission.

IP: I always advocate, at the very minimum, for the benefit of the doubt to be granted to our soldiers and marines. As horrendous as this case sounds, I’m not going to contradict myself and now begin pronouncing … It always breaks my heart when I hear about allegations of misconduct. I’m always thrilled when I hear those charges are exonerated. At the same time, if allegations of misconduct are proven, then I want to make sure those that are guilty – and that are in fact guilty – are punished. Because what they do is they undermine our mission generally and as a result they create a national security problem for us.

DR: I may be remembering this wrong. But I think you did some security consulting in Afghanistan…

IP: I don’t want to go into detail on that. I just want to say that I’ve been to Afghanistan and I’ve written on some observations on Afghanistan. I don’t want to comment on time spent there.

DR: Okay. Maybe you can comment on this. Blackwater just won a chunk of a $10 billion State Department contract — even after company employees were accused of all kind of bad things, including killing more than a dozen civilians. At what point — if any — should a company be banned from government work for its employees’ behavior?

IP: The reality is we just do not have the forces at State, we do not have the forces – candidly, we don’t even have the military forces that are required to do the securing, whether it’s of forward operating bases, whether it’s of intelligence assets, whether it’s of convoys – and we have to rely on contractors.

When you go to these war zones, there are a couple of companies that get the job done and that would keep you, or keep your wife, or keep your daughter safe. And we need to be mindful that the same people that are taking it on the chin in the public square are the same people that, time after time, are the go-to people by men and women in the know.

So I would not disparage Blackwater or Xe. I would not disparage Triple Canopy. I will not disparage any of our private security contractors because I happen to know these guys. I happen to respect these guys. And I happen to think that the job they have is about one of the most thankless jobs and one of the most dangerous jobs in the world. And without it, our rebuilding efforts would grind to a halt. Because if a State Dept guy or a CIA gal can’t leave their base to go somewhere, then the American efforts to rebuild will fail. So their role is critical. Yes, I want there to be standards. Am I going to weigh in on when someone should be barred from service? No.

IP: The communication that needs to come from America and the West to the Muslim countries in the world needs to be multi-pronged. Some of it just needs to be entirely some of the softer and some of the more cultural communications. Some of it needs to be more overtly government-directed. We task our troops to be ambassadors of the American way. And yet, ironically, we do not allow the teaching of the Constitution or the founding documents to members of the armed forces for some bogus fear that that would be political indoctrination. And yet I’m forced to teach my men the Koran so that they’re culturally sensitive.

I just want to make another comment. I am a born again Christian and I think it’s unconscionable the fact that we have highest suicide rate that we’ve ever had among returning men and women. And yet a chaplain is not allowed to close a prayer in the name of Jesus Christ. As a Christian, I think that that’s offensive. We’re stunned that these men and women have these God-shaped holes in their hearts. And yet, we’re not allowed to talk to them about God, but we force them to learn about a Koran so that they can be a good ambassador.

DR: So, the broad Muslim population is the contested territory in this war of ideas. How do you reconcile that with scare talk — “mosques go[ing] up like mushrooms” — and demonization of Islam?

IP: I don’t think that that’s a fair characterization. I don’t think that I’ve demonized Islam. I am forthright in identifying what I think the threat from radical Islam is and it’s a real threat. The quote specifically [was about the so-called “Ground Zero Mosque.”] Should we reward suicide or homicide attacks like 9/11 with allowing a mosque to be built on what in essence is hallowed ground at the gravesite of 3,000 slaughtered Americans? … That is providing territorial conquest. So I do not support that wherever Americans have been butchered by Islamic terrorists, I do not support building a mosque there.

DR: You just contrasted “God” and a “Koran.” Isn’t that the definition of demonization? And explain to me: how is putting a prayer rug at the old Burlington Coat in any way a territorial conquest?

IP: If you had been standing on the Burlington Coat Factory building you would have been killed on 9/11. We can be coy about well, is it really ground zero or not but the answer is: It’s ground zero. Because if you had been standing on the roof, you would be dead. And that makes it ground zero.

As a New Yorker, as a 9/11 witness and more importantly as an American, I am deeply offended by the decision to want to put a mosque in a building that was struck by a piece of the landing gear of a plane being piloted by guys who just minutes before had slit the throats of unarmed American stewardesses. If that sits well with other people, that’s fine with them. It doesn’t sit well with me and I object.